Dentalized

Dentalized refers to a speech sound that is produced with the tongue contacting or approaching the upper teeth, giving it a dental place of articulation. This can be a secondary articulatory feature or a phonemic property of a language's consonant system, and in some descriptions may extend to analyses of vowels in certain theoretical frameworks.

In phonetic transcription, dentalization is commonly represented by appending a dental diacritic to a consonant, yielding symbols such as t̪, d̪, s̪, or n̪. These indicate that the articulation is more dental than the typical alveolar production. Dentalized consonants can result from coarticulation with neighboring dental sounds or from an intrinsic phonological specification in a language, where a contrast exists between dental and alveolar (or other) articulations.

Dentalization is contrasted with alveolar articulation, where the tongue’s tip or blade contacts the alveolar ridge, and with interdental articulation, where the tongue is positioned between the teeth. It can be a non-contrastive, allophonic variation in some languages or a distinctive, phonemic feature in others. In addition, the term is sometimes used in clinical or speech-language pathology to describe a lisp-like production where sibilants are produced with prominent dental contact.

Across languages, the presence and status of dentalization vary: some languages routinely use dental or dentalized variants in certain phonetic environments, while others maintain a strict alveolar or other articulation.